This Song Will Save Your Life

“There are two things that make someone a great DJ. One is technical skills. Not leaving gaps between the songs, not accidentally playing two songs at once, starting songs from the point that you want—that kind of thing. One of the most important things to master is beat matching. Do you know what that is?”

“It’s when you fade in one song while you’re still fading out the other,” I answered, while looking around the room for a place to sit down. Nothing. No chairs, no couches, no rug. The only place to sit was on the bed, next to Char. But the idea of that made my hands feel shaky again. Did he have sex with Pippa here, in this bed?

“Right,” Char said, like he was answering my unspoken question. “If there’s a pause between songs, people will use that as an opportunity to go to the bathroom, or get another drink, or for whatever other reason leave the dance floor. Your goal, as DJ, is to make them stay on the dance floor. So when you match the beats from one song to the next, there’s an overlap, but it sounds harmonious, not cacophonous, and no one even notices that they’re dancing to the next song until they’re already in it. Give it a shot.”

So I hooked up my laptop to Char’s mixer, and he talked me through transitioning from “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to “Young Folks.” But it did not sound, as he had suggested, harmonious. It sounded like a headache.

Char leaned back against his pillows and watched me, a smile playing on his lips.

“Okay, what am I doing wrong?” I asked after the third time that I completely failed to align the two songs.

“It’s just hard,” Char said. “For starters, you’ve picked two songs that happen to be really tricky to beat match. Start with something more straightforward. I learned to do this by transitioning from ‘This Must Be the Place’ into ‘This Must Be the Place.’ It’s easier to figure out how songs match up when they’re the same song.”

So I tried doing that for a while, but still I couldn’t get the beats to hit at the same time.

“I think I’ve ruined this song for myself,” I told Char. “Have I ruined it for you, too? I’m sorry. It used to be so enjoyable.”

“It takes more than ten minutes of repeating the same song for me to grow sick of it,” Char said. “But there are definitely songs that I’ve ruined for myself. Like ‘Girls and Boys.’”

“The Blur song?” I said, resting the headphones around my neck for a moment. “But it’s so good!”

“Ah, that just means you don’t go out enough. I’ve been going out three or four nights a week for the past three years. That means I’ve gone out roughly five hundred times. And every single time, I have heard that song. Now, the word girls appears in that song thirty-two times. That means that I have heard Damon Albarn say the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. What percentage of my life do you think I have spent listening to that song?”

I shrugged. “Math.”

“Algebra?” he asked.

“Geometry. Algebra was last year. I’m a sophomore, Char.” I put the headphones back on and tried again for the “This Must Be the Place” into “This Must Be the Place” transition. No luck.

Char hopped off the bed and came over to stand next to me. He reached across me to press pause on my computer. Then he gently removed the headphones from my head and flipped them so that one side was pressed against his ear and the other was pressed to mine. His head was just a few inches away from my own. “Okay,” he said, and he started the song from the begi

He gestured at me to start the other song, and then in my free ear I heard him start to count measures, while in the headphones I heard only the kick of the first song as we kept rocking our hands forward and backward together. “And one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one—”

He pulled my hand off the record, and the two songs took off together, perfectly in sync.

He let go of my hand but didn’t move away. “Now slowly take that slider from one side to the other,” he instructed, and I did. “And that, Elise,” he concluded, turning to face me straight on, “is how to beat match like a DJ.”

Suddenly, “This Must Be the Place” wasn’t ruined for me anymore. Suddenly it was the greatest song I had ever heard.

“You know,” he said, studying me, “you actually have a fantastic smile.”

“Three years of braces,” I explained.

“No, seriously,” he said.

“They also pulled four teeth. Before the braces. That probably helped.”

“Why don’t you smile more often?” he asked.

“I smile about as often as I feel like smiling,” I answered. “Sometimes more, because I read this study that said people like you better when you smile.”

Char laughed. “Does that work? Are people really that easy to trick?”

“In my experience,” I said, “no.”

“Bummer.” He returned to his bed.

“So how’s Pippa?” I asked, switching over to an old Smokey Robinson. The transition sounded messy again, but a little better this time.

Char sighed.

“You know,” I said, “just speaking of people who want people to like them better. It’s a natural transition.”

“No offense, but your transition from ‘This Must Be the Place’ to ‘This Must Be the Place’ worked better.”

“How is Pippa?” I repeated.

“Pippa texted me on Friday with a million apologies and thanks, since Vicky told her that I was the one who carried her home from Start. So that seemed good, because if she could text, then at least we knew that she was alive.”

“And how did you respond?” I asked, scrolling through songs on my computer.

“I didn’t.”

“You just didn’t text her back?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems a little rude, Char.”

He leaned his head against the wall. “I just don’t want to lead her on, you know?”

“So that’s the last that we’ve heard from Pippa?” I asked. “A text acknowledging that she’s alive?”

Char looked shamefaced. “Not exactly.”

I sighed. “What did you do?”

“Well, I ran into Pippa and Vicky at Roosevelt’s last night.” I must have looked blank, because he added, “It’s a bar. They have this amazing monthly soul night. The DJ spins only forty-fives, and his collection is out of this world. Last night he was playing this Lee Dorsey song I’d never even heard before—”

“Pippa,” I reminded him.

“Pippa. Right. I brought her home with me.”

I stopped the song with a screech. “You’re telling me you didn’t want to lead her on, so you brought her home with you?”

He rested the back of his hand against his forehead. “I hear what you’re saying. I don’t know. It made sense at the time.”

“When did she leave here?”

“About an hour ago.”

I looked around Char’s room again, seeing it now with fresh eyes. Pippa was just here.

“Vicky is going to kill you,” I said.

Char gave his pillow a shove. “Vicky is overprotective. It’s not like I’m some pariah, preying on Pippa’s naïveté. She knows how I feel. She wasn’t drunk last night, or at least not as drunk as she usually is. She made her own rational, adult decision to come home with me. She wanted to.”

I thought about Pippa on Thursday, passed out on a bench. “I think Pippa wants a lot of things that aren’t good for her.”

Char shrugged. “Don’t we all?”

I rubbed my thumb across the inside of my left wrist and didn’t reply.

“This is a downer,” Char said abruptly. “I shouldn’t be burdening your young mind with my old-man problems.”

“Once again, if you missed it, I am a sophomore. And furthermore? It’s not like you have to be a legal adult to have problems.”